The cabbage market is like a gamble: win the bet and it's like hitting the lottery, lose the bet and you lose your whole stake.

Taiwanese people love to eat cabbage, and cabbage prices tug at nerves across Taiwan, China. After a typhoon, prices can soar to 200 or 300 yuan; when winter brings a huge harvest and the market unfortunately collapses, three heads of cabbage can only be traded for one tea egg. The cycle of cabbage gold and cabbage dirt plays out year after year. People in the industry often say that growing cabbage is like gambling: bet on the right timing and you can make a bundle, but lose the bet and you not only lose your capital, many people also flee to avoid their debts.

To enter the cabbage gamble is to bet against the weather, the market and government pressure. Professional vegetable farmers refuse to be outdone; they race to secure seedlings while closely tracking temperature trends and market supply and demand, trying to ride the cabbage gold wave. Besides the farmers, wholesalers are also big players, seeking out conservative farmers willing to contract-grow, stacking their cards well and waiting for the right moment to bet against market prices. There are even speculators who jump in temporarily, simply following high market prices to take a gamble.

The weather is hard to control, but the direction of the market depends on whoever can steer it, and that is where it blows. This year after the typhoons, vegetable prices soared and public pressure mounted, so suppressing vegetable prices became a key task for the Council of Agriculture. From the end of October it kept issuing collapse warnings; before cabbage even hit the market in volume, it repeatedly used a strategy of public statements to steer the market downward, forcing many cabbage farmers to harvest early and jump ship to protect themselves. The wholesale market price had already fallen to 10 yuan per kilogram, and at the consumer end prices as low as 50 yuan for two heads of cabbage began to appear. A gamble that originally would not be decided until late winter may end early this year.

Low entry threshold for cabbage: anyone can come and take a gamble

Looking at prices at the Taipei fruit and vegetable wholesale market, cabbage prices are like a roller coaster, rising and falling. Over the past ten years, when prices were good the average wholesale price could reach 50 or 60 yuan per kilogram; when prices were disastrous, falling below 5 yuan has become the norm. This year, because three typhoons in a row swept away most lowland vegetables, the market had no vegetables, and the wholesale price of cabbage rose to more than 70 yuan per kilogram, reaching the retail end at up to 300 yuan per head.

It is precisely because of such wild swings that when farmers talk about cabbage, their opening line is always love-hate. Zeng Jianhe, head of the seventh vegetable production and marketing group in Zhutang, Changhua, who has grown bulk vegetables for 6 years, said the outcome for cabbage cannot be judged, and no one knows who will win or lose until the final moment. Aside from avoiding the high-mountain cabbage season in planting, honestly everyone is each year gambling that July, August, September and October will not take their crop away; those who can make it through will at least make a profit.

Why say that those who make it through will at least make a profit? Generally speaking, the early-stage costs of growing cabbage on one fen of land, including seedlings, pesticides, fertilizer and land rent, are about 20,000 yuan, while the later-stage management and marketing costs, including harvesting and transport to the wholesale market, bring the cost to about 4 or 5 yuan per kilogram. So if the wholesale market price falls below 5 or 6 yuan per kilogram, farmers lose everything.

Besides the low cost, cabbage has a high yield per unit area: one fen of land can produce 5,000 kilograms of cabbage (3,000 kilograms for organic cabbage), and it can go straight to the auction market without processing or cutting. Therefore, from amateur farmers with a few fen of land to professional farmers with dozens of jia, anyone can enter, and with strong market demand, they take a gamble one way or another.

A hardened gambling spirit: even the warning mechanism is useless

When Zeng Jianhe first took over his father's vegetable plot 6 years ago, he got a taste of the sweetness of making money. At that time cabbage prices were good; when the harvest was sent to the Xiluo fruit and vegetable market, it fetched 70 or 80 yuan per kilogram, and his three-jia plot earned more than 1 million. But the next year, when the market rushed in to plant en masse and there were few typhoons, in the end a 30-kilogram box of cabbage did not even fetch 50 yuan. I lost so much that I could not recover even the costs I had put in, and his field could not escape being plowed under.

Although in 2010 the Council of Agriculture set up a bulk vegetable planting registration and seedling supply warning mechanism, which estimates the total cabbage and heading Chinese cabbage planting area across Taiwan, China by collecting the number of seedlings sold by nurseries, and once the estimate exceeds 180 to 200 hectares and a collapse may be looming, it sends text messages to notify farmers, farmers are all hardened gamblers and still place orders with nurseries one month before planting. Everyone wants to make money. If I need bottled water and you have it on hand, would you not sell it?

But after being plowed under for 1 or 2 years in a row, Zeng Jianhe was frightened, so he moved toward transformation. Today his main crop is greenhouse cherry tomatoes, and only about five jia of fields remain as his bulk vegetable gambling table. He plants cabbage on a fixed two jia and three fen each year, while the other area is planted according to market vegetable prices. That way, if I take a big loss, at least I still have cherry tomatoes to earn from.